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Internet Privacy: Your tweet could expose your location

The next time you post a tweet about being ‘at home’ from your mobile device with locations services enabled, you should be wearing a worried sign rather than a smile. Confused? We give you a reason to do so. WeKnowYourHouse.com, a social networking privacy experiment throws open the profiles and locations of folks who tweet with their location services ON and even displays the actual location in the world on a Google Map.

Having seen a similar experiment with Facebook, users may want to ring the bell of being careful while tweeting the next time. With all legit work being done through this experiment, it’s surprising when the Twitter Search API simply gives away the recent tweets that match the search query, in this case being ‘at home’, where the result contains all recent posts that contain the words ‘at home’. Having done this, the posts with location data (latitude and longitude) are filtered and later geocoded into human readable addresses which can be easily pointed out on a Google world map.

Letting the whole world know about your present location can turn out to be risky enough to put you into trouble. This data can be accessed by complete strangers who may want to loosen your pocket containing cash or have an eye for the new gadgets at home that just arrived from the annual sale fair.

However, the data on the website is displayed only for the past hour and stays there for exact 60 minutes after which it is deleted from the database. But, a one-hour window is enough for strangers to cast an ‘evil eye’ and plan accordingly.

In case your tweet is featured on the WeKnowYourHouse.com website with your location and you want it to be deleted, head over here and complete the procedure to make sure your content is no longer available.

It might look ‘cool‘ to enable location services but we’d advise you against it.